


A New Yu

by MittensMcEdgelord



Category: Prey (Video Game 2017)
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-17
Updated: 2020-12-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 04:48:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 5,183
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24777919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MittensMcEdgelord/pseuds/MittensMcEdgelord
Summary: Morgan Yu has returned to the rebuilt Talos station after a long medical leave at the Mare Imbrium Research Center following the deployment of the prototype nullwave transmitter. The Typhon occupation of earth has been slowed by the research team and the implementation of combat-centered Typhon neuromods by Terran military forces. He’s ready to settle in and work on the big picture: Project Cobalt.The only problem is that another Morgan Yu has already finished his job for him.
Comments: 12
Kudos: 32





	1. 7 AM

The alarm chimes 7 AM. Morgan jolts back and his pen rips through the diagram.

At this point the alarm is more for the sake of routine than an actual wake up call. No one sleeps much anymore. He can’t remember the last time he’s had anything other than an unplanned micronap at his desk. The dreams always come unbidden when his eyes close. The blackness of empty thought gives way to something darker, something deep and unfathomable that reaches out to grab him. The pen is gone when he reaches for it. The mug casts no shadow. He grabs the wrench from the hook above the work bench and swings it into the mug without thinking. Coffee splatters across the drawing. The ink leeches and bleeds until it’s hard to tell what kind of mechanism was supposed to be inside the new neuromod. Just outside of his vision, a shadow slips under the doorway. He pops open a can of Kafe Karsk and leans back in the chair. The blackness is always there on the peripheral, reaching out and raking its claws against the most vulnerable parts of his mind. It wouldn’t be so bad if it didn’t get closer every time he shut his eyes.

He finishes the can in four gulps and celebrates a new record for coffee drinking speed. 

\---

The alarm chimes 7 AM and Morgan throws the crushed can at it. Coffee spirals out behind the can like the tails of a kite. It falls with the kind of suffocating slowness he’d expect of microgravity, but not his office.

“I drank that.” He swipes his fingers through the coffee dripping off the edge of the desk. There’s an empty can beside his hand. Finished in four gulps, he thinks with dry amusement. He pulls another can out of the mini-fridge by the desk and puts a note on it reading ‘not empty’ along with the time, 7:04 AM. The can comes with him to the computer desk. The diagram is ruined and, honestly, he doesn’t have the energy to start a new one. He hasn’t had the energy since he got back from earth, since he came back home to find it filled with Typhon and all of his research effectively destroyed. The full inbox has been a testament to that. But it isn’t full. The flashing screen tells him about three new emails instead of the over a hundred that should have been there.

Morgan clicks through them, writing down the date of the replies for each one. They span just under a week. The most recent was this morning and it’s already been responded to by Dr. Park. His finger is on the mouse button when he hears glass shatter. One of the empty mugs lies in pieces on the floor. The four ‘not a mimic’ notes on it are still securely adhered to the rim.

“Synaptic damage,” he whispers. “Neuromod installation and removal can cause phantom memories and hallucinations. It’s well documented. Lack of sleep makes it worse.”

The mug doesn’t move when he picks it up. The pieces clink into the trash recycler compartment and remain there, along with the broken mug from yesterday. He hesitates at the button. The darkness slips behind his eyes and pulls him back. He scoops up the rest of the mugs, some still with coffee in them, and throws them all into the recycler. Every can on his desk and everything that he doesn’t remember, completely remember, bringing into the workshop with him finds its way into the recycler’s input. When he finally hits the button he gets enough fabricator cubes to make an entire arsenal.

\---

The alarm screams 7 AM and Morgan screams with it. 

“Whatever kind of test this is, I want it called off!” His hands shake at his sides and his body shudders into something that isn’t quite himself. He can almost hear the sound of Bellamy’s pen scribbling away as he tries to force the Typhon-like appendages back into arms. The Kafe Karsk in the mini-fridge is untouched. The notebook with the new Neuromod he’s been working on for who knows how long is ignored. Morgan walks straight to the projection of a window and slams the wrench into it. He can hear alarms going off as the glass finally shatters.

The face on the other side of the glass isn’t Bellamy. Another Morgan Yu stares at him with a picture perfect look of professional distress.

“What are you?” He whispers. The sound of security rushing in drowns out his voice. The other Morgan doesn’t move. It just stands there, smiling at him with too many teeth that are too white. It doesn’t move when the gas starts filling the room. Doesn’t move when the station security finally shows up. His fingers tighten around the wrench and he makes a desperate lunge at the imperfect copy.

\--

The alarm sounds 7 AM. Morgan doesn’t get out of bed. There aren’t words in any human language for how exhausted he is--not even German, which he thought had a phrase for everything. He sits up in bed to inspect the strangely empty room. His TranScribe has two messages. One is from Alex: “Meeting Reschedule”. It’s the kind of boring message he’d expect to find in the beginning of a test, full of business talk and Alex’s cliched assurances that everything would still go according to plan even if Tuesday’s 9 AM meeting was postponed until Thursday. Morgan briefly considers throwing the TranScribe across the room.He gives it a test throw in the air before catching sight of the second message. “Subject Alpha: Possible Mirror-Neuron Rejection” sent by one Dr. Morgan Yu. April 4th 2036, 4 AM. 

“I never sent this,” Morgan whispers. But, in the back of his mind, doubt is already taking shape. He doesn’t remember it being April. He doesn’t remember which Neuromod he’s on or which experiment he’s in. There’s a chance, however slim, that he wrote this. The journal covered in coffee stains has notes on a hybridization project, a last ditch effort to implant mirror-neurons into a Typhon in case everything went very wrong very fast. “Sleep deprivation. I’ve been working on Project Cobalt nonstop.”

He takes a deep breath, holds it, and exhales. This would be the perfect time for some of those ‘grounding’ meditations his mother insisted would help him focus on school work. He remembers exactly none of those exercises. The air tastes stale as he tries to focus on his breathing. It tastes like a supply box that’s been closed too long during the flight from earth to Talos and he fights not to choke on it.

The message on the TranScribe starts playing as soon as his fingers brush against it. Morgan sits down on top of the kitchen counter and watches the icon that should be him, but isn’t.

“Subject Alpha is displaying an astonishing amount of memory between tests, Dr. Park. We need to keep a closer eye on the wiping procedure to make sure we don’t have another security breech if he gets spooked again. I’m worried that the ongoing deviations in personality and behavior are a sign of something bigger. So far the subject has been pretty stable, though he’s shown below-average empathy during the most recent tests. The sudden aggression could be indicative of delayed mirror-neuron rejection. If that’s the case, we’re going to have to go back to the drawing board.”

The message ends on a low note. The experiment isn’t working right. But there isn’t an ongoing experiment. Project Cobalt hasn’t taken off yet. Morgan has the early stages of the planning notes on his desk, covered in canned coffee, and nowhere near ready for testing. He stalks over to the desk and double checks, then triple checks, the contents of the journal. The subject matter is right. The date is off.

“January.” Morgan holds the stained paper closer and squints, just to be sure he hasn’t misread. “January 21st. Possible Mirror-Neuron Implantation.”

He flips through the pages to the end, making sure there are no more recent entries that he hasn’t found. It’s blank. Everything after January is completely empty. A hundred pages of coffee stains and hastily written dates. Nothing too unusual. It isn’t until he circles back around to the earlier entries that he realizes there was something after January, a few blank pages act as a buffer for ‘Notes’ before February should have started. The pages are missing, cut out with surgical precision. Morgan keeps his expression neutral and sits down to the unfinished neuromod. Whoever is watching him is waiting for him to mess up and he’s not going to.

The image of the Other Morgan takes shape in his mind. The one with too-perfect teeth and an aggravatingly full beard. The one on the TranScribe. The one on the other side of the glass. Whatever is going on, he needs to come up with a plan before he does anything. 

Morgan Yu works at his desk until lunch time, eats instant udon and a can of tea, then chases it with coffee. He works with laser-guided focus and eats a late dinner. He doesn’t write down the last few day’s events in code, disguised as encrypted specs for the neuromod. He doesn’t feign sleep and wait to see if April 4th restarts some time during the simulated night. He acts exactly like Morgan Yu is supposed to act and prays that that’s what the observers see.  
The problem occurs before reset. Morgan fell asleep in spite of the coffee. It isn’t something he’s proud of. He jolts awake to the feeling of being watched. A shadow stands at the foot of his bed, emanating TV static and leaking ink upwards. Every fiber in his body is screaming to go for a wrench, for a GLOO gun, for **something** but he can’t move. The phantom hovers above him before coalescing into a person. Into him. The other Morgan Yu sits down at his table and looks through his journal. He focuses on keeping his mind empty. If it doesn’t hear his thoughts it can’t find the notes. If it ignores him and tomorrow is April 5th, there might be a chance to escape this fucked up test.


	2. Good Luck

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Today is April 5th. If Morgan wants it to be the 6th any time soon, he's going to have to find a way to play the system and get out of this insane test. 
> 
> He doesn't belong here. He's not a test subject. Not a Typhon.
> 
> _Right?_

If this is a test for new neuromods, Morgan is lodging a request for technopath implants the next round. The alarm clock remains oblivious to the hate and despair centered on it as Morgan forces himself out of bed. A thick fog separates him from his thoughts. He goes through the motions of starting the coffee pot and turning on the miniature rice cooker, though his stomach feels like it’s somewhere just left of Neptune at the moment. He closes his eyes and tries to focus on his body, on what it’s doing right now. It doesn’t feel right. It doesn’t even feel like _his_ but that’s nothing new since the testing started.

Morgan sits down on the edge of the bed and picks up the alarm clock. 7:15 AM. April 5th. He forces down the excitement building inside him. Whatever he did yesterday worked. If he can avoid reset long enough to talk to Alex, maybe there’s a chance. The email said something about testing--even if it was clearly wrong, since he was neither Subject Alpha nor lacking empathy--which meant that at some point someone was going to take him out of here. It would be the perfect chance to make a break for it and find Alex.

“Alex,” Morgan calls in the general direction of where the nearest observation window should be. “Alex, we need to call this off. That is my professional opinion. A subject needs to be mentally sound or the new neural pathways formed by the neuromod will be severely inhibited. We have studies to back that up.”

Silence answers. But the thing he wants to hear him probably got the message. Whatever it is, if it’s pretending to be him, it has to at least fake an interest in the test subject’s well being.

_Maybe it’s not pretending,_ the Darkness whispers to him. He shakes off the sudden coldness, the sudden feeling of being outside in in space. But it’s too late. The voice has sunk its claws into him and he almost, **almost** , believes it.

The rice is shit. It tastes like it was reheated for the third time instead of just cooked. Morgan tries not to think about the possible implications of that. He finishes three bites before giving up to just drink his breakfast. The coffee is plain drip coffee, synthesized in some lab in Japan before being freeze dried and shot into space. Which is to say that it is also shit. Did food always taste this bad? Maybe. It wasn’t like Morgan took time out of his day to appreciate the subtle, chemical aftertaste of instant udon when he was working. If he got out of here any time soon, he was going to get some of the cherry blintz Mikhaila liked and actually take the time to **taste** them.

God.

Mikhaila.

He’s suddenly overwhelmed by the need to see her. Even if they parted on less than great terms. Mikhaila would understand. Or would try to. He’d saved her by getting her meds. She saved him by pointing out that feeding people to Typhon was, by all accounts, a shitty thing to do and probably considered murder in most places. She hated him, at the end. But he hated him too. So he nuked the Apex and hoped he’d go with it. Everyone loves a noble sacrifice. If they made a movie about Talos whoever played him--he was hoping for John Cho, personally--would have won an award for their moving performance. That wasn’t how it went. He was alive. Barely. Alex sent him to one of the lunar bases to recuperate after the not-inconsiderable amount of Typhon in him had self-destructed. And now…

Now he’s in a nightmare. Or maybe some kind of sick simulation. 

He wonders if she hates the new Morgan too. Maybe his empathy quotient is as perfect as his unnaturally symmetrical face. Maybe the Other has won over the research team and now he’s stuck here, the imperfect original.

_Or the imperfect copy,_ the darkness whispers.

Morgan takes a breath and tries to ignore it. He squeezes his eyes shut against the facsimile of what should be his safe haven. The darkness creeps in. Turns the light behind his eyes gold. Fragmented.

It calls out to him.

The words aren’t any language he knows. He wants to laugh at that. His mom thought everything could be useful, one day, for business. And yet here he is needing to know an alien language more than he ever needed Finnish. Morgan tries to will it to make sense, to piece the fragments of thoughts into something like human communication, but he can’t. It falls away, like a half-heard conversation from another room. He grasps at the gold threads and swears he feels them vibrate in his hands before fading. 

Everything is gold now, oscillating. It reminds him of a physics paper he read about how maybe everything--matter, consciousness, _souls_ \--were the product of universal vibrations syncing up just right. It sounded so stupid coming from his professor. Looking out at the golden threads, he suddenly realizes how beautiful it is.

\---

Morgan Yu wakes up to the sound of the rice cooker beeping. He struggles out of bed with the kind of headache that mid-century poets wrote bestsellers about. It is, he decides, about as glamorous as another other Monday-morning-vodka-hangover. He wishes Jason were there to fill him in and redirect his calls. He wishes Jason was there at all.

His body works on autopilot, not unlike his kitchen appliances. Coffee is already in his cup, just waiting for him to pour in a splash of entirely-too-well-preserved soy creamer. It’s hard to get up here, so he doesn’t usually bother. Today feels like a good day to treat himself, though that could be the hangover talking. The rice is perfect: fluffy, white, and just sticky enough he can shovel it into his mouth straight out of the pot.

It feels wrong.

He takes another bite and swear the rice was supposed to be awful. Day old. Reheated. Absolute shit. Morgan tries to write it off as the hangover, as the neural drift. But he can’t shake the taste of burnt rice. Just like he can’t shake the image of the Other.

The thought dampens his appetite, but Morgan still manages to finish off half of the pot before heading to his desk. Two emails await:

April 6th. “Strange Behavior” from Alex, CC’d to most of the research department.

April 7th “Advanced Testing Required” from someone named Park Bon-Hwa, who he assumes is part of the replacement team.

Morgan gets a can of coffee from the mini fridge by his desk, writes the customary ‘Not a Mimic’ note, and considers deleting both emails. If they weren’t bait, they would have made sure he couldn’t read them. He knows the testing procedures, know about the importance of a closed environment. No one on this team should be this sloppy. The emails on his computer are deliberate. Maybe another test?

The emails remain ignored in favor of the ruined diagrams from yesterday. (It was yesterday, wasn’t it? ) It’s relaxing. He’d call it therapeutic even. Science is easy; it always has been for Morgan, at least more so than things Alex thought should be easy like small talk or ballroom dancing. Everything eventually makes sense, if if only in an abstract way. Even the Typhon made sense after enough study. This whole mess doesn’t make sense, but it will. He just needs more time and research.

Two hours pass in what should be fifteen minutes. There are four empty coffee cans with ‘Not a Mimic’ post it notes in slightly different styles of writing. The entirety of the Talos dossier on _Typhon Andromimesis _is hidden in his neuromod sketch, translatable only by Morgan, Bellamy, Jason, and Mikhaila, who probably threw out all of his letters with the cipher in them anyway. He writes down the date and the precious few speculations he has in the ‘Notes’ section of the page.__

__He feels a little more prepared for the inevitable reset, even if the thought turns his stomach. Morgan opens one last coffee as he hastily scribbles ‘Good Luck’ on the diagram in the most ostentatious faux-calligraphy he can manage with a ballpoint pen. He takes a breath and holds it. Counts down from ten. And opens the first email with a shaky exhale._ _

___[ To: M. Yu; B.H.Park; T.Hanh; N.Kravchuk  
From: A.Yu  
Subject: Strange Behavior_

__I know we’ve been though this before about memory wipes between stages, but there’s something strange about this subject. It knows it’s in a test and it wants out. It’s asking me to let it out. Exactly how much of Morgan’s memories does this thing have? It acts too much like him for comfort sometimes._ _

__\- Alex Yu ]_ _

__Morgan rereads it. Once. Twice. It sounds wrong no matter how many tiems he goes over it. “The subject.” Is that him? It has to be. They think he’s a copy of himself, but why? What idiot would want two Morgan Yus on the station? Alex could hardly deal with one of him._ _

___Because,_ the Darkness whispers. _You were practically a Typhon already with all of the neuromods. It says right in your research that it wouldn’t work unless a person was already laced with Typhon material, or maybe the other way around…__ _

__He wants to argue, to assert his humanity, but he can’t. Not when he worked so hard to surpass humanity. Not when he turned to the Typhon to do so._ _

__Morgan puts his head on the desk and forces back the urge to scream. He opens his mouth and static pours out. Just outside of his vision his fingers dissolve into black tendrils. He reaches out to turn the computer off-- _throw it across the room_ \--but as soon as he touches it sparks fly._ _

__This wasn’t part of the plan. This is the opposite of acting normal. Morgan watches the computer screen’s slow, glitchy death and waits._ _

__\--_ _

__Morgan is already eating his rice by the time the alarm goes off. He woke up early enough to fry an egg and chop up some half forgotten green onions to top the rice with. It isn’t quite as good as what he could get earthside, but it’ll do. That there are even eggs for him to fry is a small miracle._ _

__He finishes the rice and looks out at the projection of the arboretum. It’s beautiful. It takes everything in him to just enjoy it instead of remembering what it looked like with the limbs of the Apex twisting through the hull and luminescent spiderwebs of Coral strewn between the trees. He settles down on a small, faux Oriental rug to stretch in the hopes it’ll clear his mind. His muscles are stiff. It feels like he hasn’t moved from his work bench in days, which is a stark contrast to how well rested he feels. His limbs move through the familiar calisthenics routine jerkily, as if his body forgot how it was supposed to work. When he gets up to head to his desk his legs nearly give out under him._ _

__“Maybe I should see about stealing Alex’s old treadmill,” Morgan muses as he collapses into his desk chair. He fishes the last can of Kafe Karsk from the mini fridge before settling in to work. He sets the can on a coaster and opens the fridge again in disbelief. Didn’t he restock that yesterday? A dozen cans in one day is a bit much, even for him. “Maybe I should make an appointment with Adesina. I’m either an addict or my memory is shot. Or both.”_ _

__Neither option is heartening. He foregoes the ‘Not a Mimic’ note today on account of there being only one can of coffee in the entire suite. If he sees two, they both go in the recycler and he starts curbing his caffeine habit early._ _

__A giant, badly drawn ‘Good Luck’ symbol catches his eye from the header of today’s project. It looks less like polite encouragement and more like he was trying to recreate the decor at the Peking China Cafe. Still, it makes him laugh._ _

__“Thanks, past Morgan.” He doubts he’ll need luck, but it’s a nice sentiment. This should be a standard neuromod: teach some lucky Terran holdout how to repair clothing. He’s designed a dozen of them in the wake of the invasion, all based around the same basic model with one or two changes depending on the skillset. The ciper on this one is unusually complicated, though. A sewing mod wasn’t exactly top secret. Unless that wasn’t what it was. Alex mentioned combat mods for the Terran Allied Forces during the last company meeting, but they weren’t set to start production until at least October. Morgan sets the notebook aside to check the calendar again. April 5th. Nowhere near their projected production date and, even if they were, that was handled by the researchers in Delta, not him._ _

__The first few sentences are impossible to crack without using his code book. When he finally translates them, he’s not sure he wants to keep going. His fingers--all seven of them--tighten around the pen. He takes a breath, holds it in, and focuses on having the correct number of digits._ _

___How long do you think you can stay human this time?_ _ _

__Morgan feels his body jerk and glitch. Feels the half can of coffee swim inside him, as if there’s nothing there to contain it._ _

__He exhales. His body solidifies. His eyes linger a little too long on the description of _Typhon Andromimesis_ before he resumes his translation work. _ _

__It should be easy to ignore the voice clawing at the back of his mind. He’s dealt with Impostor Syndrome for most of his adult life, though he’d die before he admitted to it. This should be routine. But there’s something wrong with the reflection staring back at him from the darkened computer screen._ _


	3. Alex

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Morgan gets an unexpected visitor and a promise of answers.

April 5th--April 7th, he reminds himself--comes to a close with Morgan still as human as can be expected. No alarms. No more resets. He finishes the translations, reads them a second time, and then flushes them down the toilet. He stands under the shower for a few minutes without undressing, just letting the water flow over his suit. He used to get his best ideas in the shower, though they were never the ones people expected them to be.

Morgan waits for an epiphany until the water runs cold. It never comes. Every time he squeezes his eyes shut, he sees the Other Morgan. Every drop of water that hits his suit reverberates into his marrow. He’d swear on his life that he could feel the water run down his skin, even though there was no way for it to get through the suit.

_Almost like you’re not wearing anything at all, right?_

“Do you ever shut up?” Morgan screams. The shower walls amplify his question until it’s deafening. The water stops falling. Purple light flows around him. In his peripheral, threads writhe inside the light, coalescing into a web. He reaches out to touch it without thinking.

It isn’t Coral, but it’s close. He feels energy inside it, like all of the desperate thoughts rattling inside his head finally broke free. It feels like anger. Like Entropy. Like a million things he can’t quite name. It feels like fire and heat as the nullwave transmitter goes off and every Typhon mod he forced into himself to stay alive is burned out.

His knees hit the floor with a crack.

Claustrophobia sets in.

_The Panic._ The Darkness whispers. Somewhere outside of himself, there are other voices. But only this one is clear. _You should’ve died when the Nullwave went off. Don’t you think?”_

“No.”

_Because you’re not a Typhon?_ The voice pulses through him in waves, agonizing and somehow comforting. _How sure are you about that?_

Morgan staggers to his feet through the pain. The walls get closer with every second he’s standing. An invisible set of hands tries to pull him back down. He crashes into the sink and grips it like a lifeline.

Morgan Yu stares into the tiny bathroom mirror. The steam obscures most of his face, but it’s still his. Same patchy beard. Same golden skin. Same sparking white eyes. He drags his fingers across the glass and watches his features change.

Morgan Yu stares into the Darkness. And the Darkness stares back.  
\--

The alarm doesn’t go off. Morgan wakes up 10 A.M. to the sound of an airlock opening and launches himself out of bed. His legs don’t hold his weight. When he tries to stand back up there’s only numbness. Everything feels like static. He screams and white noise crackles out of his mouth.

The first edge of the Panic starts to creep in when suddenly he’s restrained. He doesn’t see the attacker. There are no alarms going off. None of the screaming he’d expect in the event of a containment breach. There’s no fighting it. His body couldn’t be less his. He’s pulled back against something soft and solid. Definitely not a Typhon.

“Morgan,” a familiar voice snaps. “C’mon, Morgan. Get it together.”

It’s the first time in a long time that the sight of his older brother brought such a rush of relief. Words well up in his throat only to die on his lips. He says nothing, but doesn’t move away. The Morgan who came up here in a medical shuttle would have shoved Alex out the false window for trying to hug him after everything that happened, but he isn’t that Morgan. He isn’t sure which Morgan he is, though.

“Am I even Morgan?” he whispers to no one, and no one answers. Alex is silent as he shifts his arms and moves to sit beside him. 

“Why do you think you’re not Morgan?” The question is cautious, each word pulled out of his mouth like pulling teeth. Alex meets his gaze and holds eye contact just a little too long. He could reach into Alex’s mind, excise the thoughts he’s hiding down beneath that permanently calm exterior, and figure out the answer himself. But he doesn’t. Morgan, the Morgan Alex knows, probably would have.

“I don’t know,” he answers. “I’m Morgan. I **have** to be. I can feel it.”

Morgan’s hands move in a familiar rhythm on his legs; his body aches to move to relieve some of the tension coiled inside him. The answer Alex is forming twists into the not-quite-coral and dies there.

“The problem isn’t that I’m not Morgan.” He barely believes what he’s saying, but just saying it is reassuring. It’s familiar in the kind of way that makes his stomach sink. “The problem is that I am Morgan, but I may or may not be the right Morgan.”

“What’s your criteria for the ‘right Morgan’ then?”

“Dr. Morgan Yu is supposed to be a handsome, genius, human scientist. The first two are a given, but the last one isn’t. I know I’m part Typhon.” He takes a breath and lets it out, slowly. Lets the hard edges of his shape soften until flecks of gold appear in his peripheral. “But I think the Other Morgan is part Typhon too.”

“What other Morgan are you talking about?”

“I’m talking about the Dr. Yu that you’ve been emailing. The one that’s in charge of the simulation. That one.”

Alex says nothing, but the sudden rigidity to his posture leaves little to discuss.

“That one’s a Typhon, too. That’s not the problem. The problem is more objective than the nature of humanity or something. Which one of us was always Morgan and which one is the new one?” The relief melts away into anger and there’s nothing he can do to force it down. In the gold threads, he sees the Other Morgan standing over his bed, tearing out pages of his journal. “Why does everyone keep calling me Subject Alpha? Why do the records show that Project Cobalt is nearly finished when I barely got started on it before being sent to Earth? Why can’t I leave the simulation?”

“Morgan, I can answer everything, but I need you to calm down first.”

“I’m in a simulation against my will. I may or may not have an alien clone doing my job. And every so often I see the world through vibrations that just so happen to take the form of gold thread.” Morgan puts a hand to his face and laughs. The sound couldn’t be less human if he tried. “Alex, I don’t think calm is going to happen.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I apologize that this chapter is so much shorter than the others, but this seemed like a good place to end it.

**Author's Note:**

> Before ‘Replica’ I started working on a very different fic with a very different hybrid!Morgan. I always meant to get back to it, but I finally just got the motivation to finish what I started. This should be a very short fic--but then again Replica was only supposed to be 8 chapters, so who knows what’s going to happen?


End file.
